Back on the horse

Over these past few weeks, I’ve busied myself with Assimil Russian and a fair bit of German reading and writing. With Russian, I’ve been doing a mix of the standard Assimil plan with some of Luca’s ideas mixed in (specifically, writing out translations, going from Russian to English and then back the other way). It’s going well; after many false starts (and stops) with the book over the past few years, I’m now about halfway through it. Provided I keep up the pace, I should be “finished” with it in a little over three months.

There were a few interesting German articles that I read, but one in particular amused me: Studentent brauchen mehr Geld zum Leben. It caught my interest because it seems fairly different from how things work in the states. We receive financial aid, but for me, at least, it was expected that the bulk of that financial aid was going towards your actual schooling costs, not living expenses; if your parents couldn’t cover your living expenses, you were going to be working. The article discusses the potential raising of monthly financial aid up to 570 – 1100 Euros per month. At the higher end of that rate, I’d consider quitting my full time job and go back to school. 😉

Also recently, I watched Anthony Lauder’s talk from the Polyglot Conference from last year. It’s an hour, but it’s worth your time. He makes some excellent points, and is hilarious, to boot. Here you go:

Lastly, I’m pretty excited about something for next year: I’ll be getting married this June, and my fiancée has agreed for our honeymoon to be in… Germany! We’ve got a lot of planning to do, but provided that all goes well, it should be a blast. I’ve been chipping away at die deutsche Sprache for years, and this will be my first time setting foot in the country. “Excited” doesn’t even come close to describing how I feel about this. 🙂